Entertainment

HOW TO: Land a Job at Airbnb

There's a curious phenomenon happening, and home owners, renters, travels and vagabonds alike are starting to feel it. It's the shift away from traditional hotel stays to temporary vacation rentals, booked by way of Airbnb.

Airbnb is the scrappy 3-year-old startup inventing an entirely new online travel marketplace. It's seeking to make unconventional couch, bedroom, apartment, home and even entire country rentals as ordinary as booking a stay at a Holiday Inn.

And, it's doing so rather successfully; Airbnb grew 800% from January 2010 to January 2011.

Airbnb now has more than 130,000 listings in over 15,000 cities in 184 countries, with renters having booked more than 1.9 million nights via the service to date. It sees more than 3 million unique visitors per month, and 40% month-over-month growth on average. Plus, the Airbnb iPhone app has been downloaded more than 330,000 times.

Once just three guys working out of a living room, the company now has 110 employees, working in offices around the globe. It's even rumored to have raised a $100 million in a financing round valuing it at more than $1 billion.

The no-longer-under-the-radar company is fielding a smattering of inbound interest from job seekers who believe an early position at the company could be as valuable a lottery ticket as an early seat at Google or Facebook.

"Ever wonder what it was like to work at Facebook when it was just fifty people?," Airbnb teases its job candidates. "Imagine building a website that sparked a movement. That's the kind of opportunity we're offering you at Airbnb."

Mashable spoke with Joe Gebbia, Airbnb's co-founder and chief product officer, to learn more about the up-and-coming company's culture and what it's looking for in new hires.

Culture Comes First

"Culture is incredibly important to us," Gebbia says. "It took us three months to hire our first employee," he adds.

Gebbia and his fellow co-founders Brian Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk were instructed early on to pay careful attention to hiring as the first 50 to 100 employees will define the DNA of the company. "We took it upon ourselves to get it right the first time," Gebbia says of heeding that advice. "We set a definite culture right from the beginning."

How does Airbnb define its culture? "Inventive," says Gebbia.

"We've invented a new marketplace. There was no easy way to rent a person's bedroom over the Internet, or book a vacation rental over the Internet," Gebbia says. "There was no guidebook for us to turn to as we defined this new marketplace … we had to invent all along the way, and that permeates our culture today."

If you want to work at Airbnb — the company has more than 75 openings and plans to hire aggressively — you too should be highly inventive.

Must Haves: Passion, Design Sensibility & Raw Intelligence

Airbnb has a laundry list of qualities it's looking for when interviewing candidates. Atop that list is a tangible passion for changing the travel industry.

"We want those who align with our noble cause. It's about more than making money; it's about connecting people in countries all around the world," says Gebbia. "Our social mission is to get people meeting each other, and we need people who align with that purpose."

The ideal Airbnb candidate is a resourceful self-starter who will need limited guidance. He or she must possess strong design sensibility — a quality stressed by Gebbia as second only to passion for the company. "You must have the ability to recognize good design and good user experience," says Gebbia. "These are core things at Airbnb. It doesn't matter which department you're in. We're ultimately a service and a product that lives or dies by user experience."

But, you'll only get so far in the interview process with passion and design sensibility, because the startup is serious about selecting only the best and brightest talent. "We hire people who are smarter than us," Gebbia says.

You should also be a strong at teamwork, be trustworthy, possess integrity and have good character, Gebbia says.

The Airbnb Interview

Interviewing for a job at Airbnb is a straightforward process. The company breaks down rolls into six pillars: product, community, customer support, finance, marketing and engineering.

You'll first meet with the hiring lead of a department. Next, you'll meet with every team member in the department.

Those who continue on in the process will meet with a cross section of the company, with someone representing each of the six pillars. If all goes well, you'll end up face-to-face with two of Airbnb's three co-founders for the final test.

The interview process is formal in function only. Airbnb cares not what you wear — even flip flops or jeans are considered acceptable interview attire. Ultimately, the startup concerns itself most with the qualities mentioned above.

Quirks That Worked

A company that defines itself as inventive is looking for candidates who stand out — people who actually embody the word "inventive," not just use it.

Case in point, Christopher Lukezic, Airbnb's director of marketing, commanded everyone's attention — Gebbia and Chesky especially — when he applied with a comic book in lieu of a resume in the summer of 2009.

At the time, Airbnb was getting hundreds of resumes (now it's seeing thousands), all of which looked the same. "Christopher had illustrated a two-page comic book about why he wanted to work at Airbnb and who he was," Gebbia recalls.

Lukezic was hired in days. But Airbnb's fastest hire was a front-end developer who redesigned the entire homepage of Airbnb.com. The developer emailed a link to his design, along with detailed explanation of why he wanted to work for the company. The link quickly made its way through the entire company.

Two hours after receipt, Gebbia phoned that developer. By that night, the prospect was on a plane to San Francisco, and by the next day everyone had agreed to bring him on board.

Inventiveness works at Airbnb.

An Inside Look at Airbnb's Lavish HQ

Airbnb set up its new headquarters in a lavish 20,000 square foot space in the Design District of San Francisco in late May. Here's a look inside:

Airbnb HQ

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

Airbnb Headquarters

Photo courtesy of Marc Olivier Le Blanc

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